SIDEWAYS

Posted at 11:44 AM

saw the movie. dem! worth it for that golden globe nod.

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^{may rally bukas sa} _mapua sama kayo! hehe wear black! 9am!

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Fellow students and professionals in the academe and industry:

On Thursday, February 17, 2005, the brewing academic unrest inside the Mapua Institute of Technology will erupt. A corporate and academic policy doesn’t really go together. Getting maximum profit is often at the expense of quality education. The fight that we, the students of Mapua Institute of Technology, have started is spreading. On that very same day, the Faculty Association of MIT will stage a simultaneous strike in support of our cause.

For a straight 80 years, Mapua students silently studied and pondered equations that essentially built our nation's infrastructures. Since 1925, Mapua Institute of Technology silently kept churning out graduates that made our nation proud, from Eduardo San Juan to Diosdado Banatao, and eventually became the country’s largest engineering community. And now, for the first time, those 80 years of silence will be broken, as we set out in the street to fight for what was taken from us - our Alma Mater and her name.

MIT was bought by the Yuchengco Group of Companies and silently transformed into a milking cow by instituting changes against the spirit of high quality engineering education originally envisioned and implemented by Don Tomas Mapua. The last strand, and the most significant of all, was the upcoming change of name of Mapua Institute of Technology to Malayan University, marking the death of our beloved Alma Mater, and with it, more than half a century of hard work and sacrifice by countless engineers to create a world class engineering institution.

Monday, February 14, 2005, marked the historic "Black Valentines" as witnessed by the Intramuros community where thousands of Mapua students and alumni, all wearing black, marched throughout the walled city and staged a prayer vigil in the Mapua Intramuros campus. None of us brought any placards or shouted anything against the administration. Our hopes for a peaceful resolution thru prayer and show of support were very high. But then, our school president released his statement to continue with the destructive changes to MIT, despite all our efforts. We were all in tears as we sang our school hymn once more, realizing that it might be our last, uttered our prayer, and pledged that our fight will not end there.

On Thursday, February 17, 2005, 9:00AM, we, the students of Mapua Institute of Technology, united in spirit in preventing the death of MIT at all cost, will go back in even greater number (more than ten thousand with combined forces from Mapua Makati campus) in Intramuros Manila to make our stand. In this endeavor, we fully understand that we might lose our jobs and scholarships, or sustain physical injury. But those are sacrifices we are willing to make, for MIT, and for the rest of the academic community, to prevent the trend of academic institutions turning into corporate preys from spreading. The socio-economic implications of such a trend are enormous.

We urge all our brothers and sisters - Filipino students from every school and Filipino professionals from every company to support our cause and wear black dress or tie black ribbons this coming Thursday. This is not only a fight by us students of MIT, but by us all, to put a stop in the destruction of our academic institutions and prevent the same from happening to your own Alma Mater. Please forward this message to your friends and colleagues.

Sincerely,
Students of Mapua Institute of Technology